Story | Solutions
A bigger village leads to bolder innovation
It starts with partnership
We’ve all heard the phrase that “it takes a village” to do anything monumental, whether it’s raising a child, winning a championship, or launching a successful product. It’s widely known that the teamwork of a tight-knit group can achieve things that no individual could ever accomplish on their own. However, when it comes to innovation, limiting your “village” to people in close proximity can restrict the kind of strategic thinking that leads to groundbreaking solutions.
At Cencora, we embrace a partnership mindset to ensure we’re not only looking ahead from our point of view, but we’re also tapping into various resources outside our company to close the gap on what is possible and solve real-world challenges every day. Finding common-sense alignment with different organizations is what transforms problems that seem complex into simple solution breakthroughs.
Combining our passion for innovation with an outside-in approach to strategy has led us to discover countless opportunities where we can build something new to help our customers succeed — and ultimately help them deliver better patient outcomes.
Laying the foundation for innovation
Cencora has a decades-long history of building customized solutions based on customer input, but our current innovation model began to take shape in 2022 with the formation of our Global Products and Solutions team. Centralizing the development of new products and solutions was an important part in our journey to becoming Cencora, as we brought the companies and services of AmerisourceBergen together under one new name. In much the same way, Global Products and Solutions helped us eliminate silos and unify our team members, so we could implement a common stage gate process for developing and testing new products.
With an enterprise-level team in place, we officially had our village — a group of like-minded, purpose-driven people working towards the same goal. But this was just the beginning. The next step was to reach beyond the borders of our organization and connect with our customers to broaden our perspective. Thus, the Innovation Partnership Program was born the following year to support our Global Products and Solutions team.
Solving healthcare challenges together
Since the Innovation Partnership Program was established, we’ve had one positive customer interaction after another, learning about the difficulties they face and collaborating on potential products to address those issues. Our ongoing conversations with both upstream and downstream stakeholders have uncovered valuable insights that led to the creation of several new solutions, with many more in development that we’re excited to bring to market in the future.
Solution spotlight
Automated Inventory Replenishment
The team behind our Innovation Partnership Program took what they learned from their conversations with that customer, created a roadmap outlining a path forward, and engaged our Global Products and Solutions team to begin thinking through ways we could alleviate this pain point. From there, our teams worked closely with the customer to continue gathering data and insights to guide development every step of the way. With the help of an additional external partner providing data and technical support, we were able to create a tool that leverages algorithms designed to provide veterinary practices with real-time inventory levels and automatically suggest orders when it’s the right time to replenish.
This exciting new solution is now being piloted by the customer who helped us identify and tackle this challenge, along with a pool of other veterinary practices that are eager to improve their inventory management processes as well. With specific goals for right-sizing inventory, decreasing shrinkage, and reducing time spent ordering, we’re tracking progress and listening to feedback to fine-tune this solution and prepare it for a broader rollout to our customers. Once launched, this solution will give veterinarians and their staff clear visibility into their inventory and provide them with confidence that it’s being managed effectively with data-driven insights — ultimately saving them time and money.
Active learning and continuous growth
In October 2024, the team behind the program embarked on a journey to better enable our enterprise strategy and have a greater impact on our customers by expanding the scope of our partnerships. They revisited all the feedback we had received from our customers and reevaluated how we can work with them more effectively moving forward. Here’s what our team learned:
Expanding our community even further
For our customers, we’re focusing on creating low-barrier channels for continuous goal sharing, like surveys and workshops. This allows us to keep the lines of communication open, so we can have a steady stream of insights flowing in without customers feeling locked into a high-pressure partnership. By building our partnership community beyond our customers and fostering long-term relationships, we’re able to tailor the Innovation Partnership Program to meet customers where they are and concentrate on validating the innovation strategies they inspired.
Jason Dinger
SVP, Strategy Execution
Innovation with maximum impact
Recalibrated and poised for the future, our Innovation Partnership Program is now actively pursuing win-win-win opportunities that will benefit everyone — from our customers to our enabling partners to organizations far and wide we haven’t had the pleasure of connecting with yet. By working smarter, our “village” of innovators at Cencora is playing to the strengths of prospective partners around the world to simplify the solution development process, solve complex problems, and truly meet our customers’ needs.
